


Flying in Circles

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [21]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Friend owls to lover owls, Owls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:09:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27179713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: Pigwidgeon is not very good at being an owl. Luckily, Hedwig is there to help. (Written for an unlikely pairings challenge back in 2014.)
Relationships: Hedwig/Pigwidgeon (Harry Potter)
Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467382
Kudos: 4





	Flying in Circles

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for an unlikely pairings challenge way back in 2014. (That means the pairing wasn't my idea - still, as far as crack pairings go, it's pretty sweet.)

Hedwig and Pigwidgeon meet for the first time on the Hogwarts Express. Through his exhaustion and confusion and flying-in-circles overexcitement, Pig vaguely registers that there is another owl in the compartment, an owl with huge sharp talons and a huge grim beak and feathers that look petal-soft. Hedwig notices that a small scrawny thing flew in through the window, and briefly considers eating it before realising it’s a fellow owl. Then she goes back to her nap.

Pig goes home with the ginger human, and likes it there a lot. He gets to eat the humans’ leftover food, and talk with the old sleepy owl and fly around all sorts of interesting new objects, and lots of humans want to play with him and sometimes they shout and throw things at him which is funny. But when the human puts him in a cage and takes him to the big stone castle, he doesn’t adjust all that well. He doesn’t have much practice carrying letters, and since the protective charms the long-haired human put on him have worn off, he has a tendency to get lost or crash-land or fly into things. He struggles with larger letters, let alone packages, and he’s really scared of disappointing the ginger human that likes him so much. The bigger owls bully him in the owlery, they steal his food and they never let him have good place to sleep. He doesn’t know how to catch food in this foreign place where the insects and rodents look and smell all different from what he is used to.

And then winter arrives, and everything gets worse. Pigwidgeon is from the South of Spain originally, and he has never experienced real cold, let alone the snowstorms that that batter the towers of Hogwarts from mid-november on. So he fluffs up his feathers and tries to stay out of the cold and eats whatever scraps of food he can find, and his deliveries arrive later and later, and he is thoroughly miserable. And eventually Hedwig notices how bad things have gotten, and decides to take him under her wing, so to speak. Pig might be a scatterbrained scrawny nuisance, but his human shares food with Hedwig’s human, so he has to be important.

So Hedwig tears some feathers out of the owls that bullied Pig, she makes it known that he is under her protection, and in a few nights nobody dares to touch him. She makes sure nobody takes his food, she lets him sleep near her in the warmest driest part of the owlery, she calls in a favour and an eagle owl shows up to take over his long-distance deliveries. And he is thankful, very very thankful, but he is sorry to have to rely on her. She smiles, as much as someone with a huge deadly beak can smile, because she didn’t intend to treat him like a day-old nestling forever. She takes him flying, gliding soundlessly and effortlessly through the storm while he flails and struggles to keep up. She teaches him how to use his little pinprick claws to take down an owl twice his size. She teaches him the best way to balance and carry a large scroll. She teaches him how to read the colours and shades and moods of this new country so that he can find the shortest flight to his goal. She teaches them how to catch mice and bugs in the school kitchen’s enormous larders, so he can hunt without needlessly leaving the warmth of the school.

They fly together for months, and by the end of it, Pigwidgeon is a good messenger and a bright navigator and altogether a rather decent owl, accepted and respected by all the other Hogwarts owls. He can stand on his own now, he can find his own food, his own sleeping place. Hedwig figures she taught him all that she could, that he is his own owl now, but she misses him a little. Because while teaching him, she has actually grown fond of the little ball of fluff, because it turns out he is quite brave and incredibly stubborn and chirpy and funny and willing to go deliver a message that only says ‘Mum please send more toffee. Love, Ron’ even when the hailstones that fall from the sky are larger than he is. 

So she likes him, she likes him a lot. And he is obviously, staggeringly in awe of her, the deadly and powerful owl who for some reason keeps helping him. And he doesn’t know if he can ever return the favour, not really, so he keeps grooming her feathers and giving her whatever tasty mouse or shiny bug he found, and flying around in nervous circles to cheer her up. She’s not sure if she’s being courted, but she really doesn’t mind the attention. It’s good to have an owl who dares to be happy around her, instead of respectfully terrified.

One night, when she arrives back from a hunt, she sees that he’s back too – back from a week-long journey to the desert over the sea, to take a letter to another of the ginger human’s brood. She didn’t want him to take the letter, she didn’t trust him to make the journey. But then he arrives back in the middle of the night with a healing cut on his left leg, his eyes wild and his feathers soaked through with sleet. He nods at her, then slumps down on one of the perches in complete exhaustion. What an idiot. What an utterly lovely little idiot. At that point, it just seems so obvious to her. She flies over to him and starts grooming his feathers. When she’s done, she puts a wing over him, trying to warm him up. He sleepily tries to move away, after all he just proved he doesn’t need coddling anymore. But she just fluffs up her feathers, and doesn’t move an inch: she is cold too, she was cold without him, so she’s going to stay.

**Author's Note:**

> Of course you can go two ways from here. You can follow canon and kill off Hedwig, leaving Pigwidgeon in befuddled mourning. Or you can go AU, where they live to a ripe old owl-age and have a cute brood of biologically improbable snowy-white chirping ping pong balls.


End file.
